Barry Carpenter – Engagement is the key

Transcript

00:00:03.141 – Alis 

In these short podcast clips, we offer nuggets of information from our longer podcasts that give advice and quick tips to help you, as teachers, recognize children’s needs and respond more efficiently, empowering you to adapt teaching effectively. Barry Carpenter is the UK’s first professor in Mental Health and Education, and his honorary professor at universities in the UK, Ireland, Germany and Australia. In July 2020, he was awarded the Distinguished Fellowship of the Chartered College of Teaching for his leadership of the education field during the pandemic. He’s been awarded an OBE and a CBE by the late Queen for services to children with special educational needs. In this nugget, we discuss the meaning of complex needs in schools and the pedagogical tension that arises from this phenomenon. As teachers, how do we know how all children learn and how to best teach in order to meet the needs of all? Barry Carpenter goes into some depths around the difficulties and delights of teaching a wide range of pupils that make up our class cohorts. The richest piece of advice is teaching engagement. He talks about how trials have shown that engagement is the key indicator for successful learning. It is the ‘liberation of intrinsic motivation’. Through this short podcast, teachers will understand that if you can motivate the child, then you can conquer learning for and with them. Let’s talk a little bit about your book. You wrote a book called Engaging Learners with Complex Needs. First of all, just what’s meant by complex needs in children? Is there a clear definition? And just go on to say a little bit about this book, what would you say the main messages? 

00:02:03.171 – Barry 

Okay. Is there a clear definition of complex needs? There wasn’t, but there is now. So it was back in, let me see, 2009. I was actually about to start a lecture tour of Australia. I was still a school principal at that time, but my board of governors were very good and would allow me time to go and carry out lecture commitments. I just arrived in Australia and was about to begin this, and I had some communication with the Department for Education. What became clear was that they were wanting to create a project, a research project, around complex needs because at that point, 2009, in that early part of the 21st century, the words ‘complex needs’ had started to be used by teachers. But there was no legal definition of what was complex needs. You could actually drive past some special schools and it would say, ‘Mrs. Bloggs’s School for Children with Severe and Complex Needs’. You cannot call a school which is a legal instrument of government in the administration of its duties towards children, something for which there is no legal basis. So you couldn’t actually officially have the ‘Complex Needs’ part in there. Long story short, eventually, I was appointed later in 2009 by Ed Balls as the Director of the Complex Learning Difficulties and Disabilities Research project. Quite a mouthful, we abbreviate it to Complex Needs. But if you take it that we talk about severe learning difficulties, moderate learning difficulties, etc, complex learning difficulties and disabilities falls into that same language structure. And one of the early tasks in that piece of work, which was a national and eventually international project and covered the four provinces of the United Kingdom, so it became more massive than ever it was meant to be, was to define what is complex needs. And so complex learning difficulties and disabilities means that a child has two or more interlocking, co-existing, compounding learning difficulties and disabilities, two or more. It’s often now, certainly now, more than two. And therefore, within that, There is a tension because as a teacher then, which pathway do you go down? If it’s autism, for example, we know we go down a predominantly visual pathway. But with other disabilities, that’s not obvious. It might be for a child of ADHD, we were using lots of auditory vocal, lots of verbal cues and clues to help the child regulate their behavior and keep on track as a learner. And yet many children have a dual diagnosis, do they not? Of ADHD and autism. But for us as teachers then, there is actually a pedagogical tension. So when we began the work, it wasn’t just about defining the population. And that in itself, yes, I would to pause and say that, there were new phenomena, there are new phenomena in this 21st century that have rewritten the special needs registers of every school. It’s just to this day, sometimes the schools don’t realize that. If I was doing SENCO training, Alis, I’d often say to them, ‘So which group of learners do you think has rewritten your special needs registers in this 21st century?’ And you get the answers, ADHD, autism, social-emotional, speech and language, But the truth is, it’s children born prematurely. 

00:06:05.371 – Alis 

Why is that? 

00:06:06.871 – Barry 

Well, 92% of all babies born prematurely, and prematurity is anything pre-36 weeks gestation, or 36 weeks and before gestation. Then it’s because those children are surviving in greater numbers than we’ve ever known. And the real difference is those children are surviving 28 weeks before, when the brain is white matter, it’s not grey matter. So the cortical folding, etc, is not there, not present in the brain and there’s parts of the brain that do not develop until post 28 weeks in utero. So some children have been born without certain aspects of the brain actually being developed. And despite that cliché of, ‘Oh, don’t worry, they’ll catch up’. I’m sorry, some children, well, many children do not. And latterly, last Christmas or Christmas before, the Lancet reported a 47% increase in children surviving 22 to 24 weeks gestation. What’s the brain of a 23 week look like? I’m not sure. And I’m not sure I’ve ever taught one. I’m not sure you’ve ever taught one Alis. And so what are the learning pathways that are available there? And how then do we teach? How do we respond as a teacher? And it isn’t enough to say, ‘Well, we might do it this way or that way’. It might not be the way that that child learns. So it’s actually modern medical progress has given rise to the survival of prematurely born children. It’s given rise to children with rare syndromes. When we did the national project, we had 31 different types of rare syndrome of the children in the cohort nationally we got. And I thought, 31 different types of rare syndrome? I’d been teaching that number of years at that time, ironically. I thought, I don’t know 31 different types of syndrome. My whole career has been in this field. Why don’t I know 31 different types? And I went back to my 1980s textbook. I didn’t want Dr. Google’s answer. I wanted to know, why did Barry not know? And when I went to my 1980s textbooks, they say things like, ‘Jacobsen syndrome: child with Jacobsen syndrome may survive until their three years of age, but then life expectancy is limited’. ‘Child with Lesch-Nyhan syndrome may survive till four years of age, but after that, life expectancy is limited’. But those children now were beginning to survive and were coming into our schools, but we had no pedagogical history of educating them. Add to that as well, there are more chromosomal abnormalities. IVF has given particular rise to chromosomal deletions, as they’re known as. And those, again, are surviving and profiling in our schools, and we have no pedagogical history. So there were these new phenomena, and also phenomena that were causing the complexity that you alluded to before, where there are two or more needs. And so really, that was the driver. Can you see, we got quite a different population to how special education have been traditionally built. Ultimately, if I may continue, if you think of those different children, you as a teacher yourself would then say, ‘Well, those children are different. In what way do they learn differently? And when we know how they learn differently, how do I teach differently?’ And we didn’t have all the answers for that. We never do, teachers. We never do. But we then went one step further and said, ‘Okay, how would we construct teaching for these children?’ And what we discovered from an international literature review and then some trials that we did was that engagement was the key indicator for successful learning. The literature tells us that engagement is the liberation of intrinsic motivation. And again, you will know from your extensive experience, if you can motivate a child, you can conquer the learning world for and with them. And so engagement became the key platform. With other things such as differentiation and personalization. But engagement was the major outcome from that, and it led to other work, which I’m sure you’re going to allude to. 

00:10:10.591 – Alis 

What were the recommendations? What did you hope that listeners could take away from this and start to maybe just improve their own pedagogy with? 

00:10:20.531 – Barry 

We got to bear in mind that now we are a profession that has been scarred by umpteen years of politically-driven curriculum. And at times, some of those political decisions, I’m sorry to say, are a mismatch with the children that we see in front of us. Phonics would be an example there. Not that I’m anti-phonics, I’m very pro-phonic. But it cannot be universally applied. But there is a particular political diktat that says, ‘Thou shalt apply it to all children’. Well, I’m sorry. If you’re deaf and you can’t hear those sounds, or you have a disability with an auditory vocal processing issue, you can’t hear the sound to reproduce them, and therefore you cannot learn to read phonetically. You need other supplementary methods. It agitates me hugely that the supplementary methods are not valued and are restrictive. In the latest reading framework guidance from the DFE says that where a child isn’t mastering phonics, then you use intensive synthetic phonics as an approach. That’s not a solution unless you’ve got a miracle cure for hearing loss. It’s not. And also some children’s brains are wired differently. The child with Down syndrome doesn’t process speech and language in the left hemisphere of the brain. They process it in the right hemisphere of the brain, which is attuned to visual pathways to learning. So my own daughter Kate, who has Down syndrome, learned… Actually, she could read at the age of five, the level that any five-year-old would read, but she signed her responses. You need to tell me, because she could sign and not speak, that that wasn’t reading. I would argue to death that that is reading. For any child, I think any teacher needs to say, ‘How do I engage this child as a learner? Then apply the curriculum’. But we need to identify how that child is a learner, and that’s what engagement does. We need a lens of engagement. If that child is coming into my class, I can see that child, but it’s only when I get my long lens out, like a professional photographer would, and turn that lens, That child becomes sharply into focus. And then I stand a much better chance of effectively teaching that child. Because without engaging that child, there will be no deep learning, there will be no meaningful progress, there will be no significant attainment and achievement. Engagement is the key. 

00:12:53.191 – Alis 

I love the notion of a teacher seeing each individual child in the class as individual and working to engage that child as an individual based on their needs, based on their interests. But how? How do you put that into practice in the day to day when you’ve got a class of 10 or a class of 30? 

00:13:17.921 – Barry 

Surely observation is still fundamental to the role of teacher. Whether you’re teaching A-level physics or whether you’re teaching the early years curriculum or the child with autism. We all still observe. I mean, okay, the A-level physics teacher, probably less so, but even then, they’re observing young people doing experiments and observing the application of knowledge in those young people and observing the outcomes of learning from what they think they’ve taught and the level to which the children have mastered that particular learning. So it’s about making more of the observation. What early years teacher on receiving the reception children doesn’t begin in by observing them through play? It’s just maximizing at times what is already in our teaching repertoire. So you’re observing. What are you observing? Fundamentally, you’re observing how the child is engaged, because if the A-level physics student is not engaged in that syllabus, is not engaged in what the teacher has said, they’re not going to get the grades. So you’re observing there, just as you’re observing fine motor and gross motor in early childhood with the children. It is still that process. And what is it we’re observing? We’re observing engagement of knowledge in physics, of early years’ play. But we’re observing the engagement of the student. We seem to have lost the focus that engagement is crucial. 

00:14:54.421 – Alis 

I think that’s the key thing. It’s not curriculum coming first, and it’s ‘I’ve got to teach this by 12:00,’ but actually maximizing the time on those crucial things, like observing, of having those strong relationships with the children and the young people that you’re working with. So you understand what you’re observing. You understand what engagement looks like for them. 

00:15:17.781 – Barry 

I don’t know whether it’s that engagement just seems to be a word that’s been around and people aren’t really considering it. But let me tell you, it’s absolutely key, particularly when there’s this talk of universal curriculum design, that whatever it is we’re designing, we got to know what the starting point for engagement is. It is just the more I’ve thought about it and seen it in practice, some of the best teaching I see now is where the teachers truly engage the children of whatever ability, including exceptionally able children. We know how disaffected those exceptionally able children can be in our schools because the curriculum has not offered challenge, because we haven’t looked at how they engage and how we can spiral out what it is we’re teaching to some really challenging stuff that perhaps they only as an individual can do. And many teachers say, ‘Well, I haven’t got time for the individual’. Excuse me, it’s just about saying to the child, Okay, that’s what everybody’s doing. When you’ve read that, why don’t you go on and read? Because that’ll already been that subject teacher’s repertoire. Why don’t you go on and read da, da, da, da, you know? It’s not that difficult. But I think we’ve oppressed teachers so much. We’ve knocked the creativity out of them, and that’s so sad, so very sad. So yes, I think engagement is key. As I think, differentiation, which is the process of adjusting teaching to meet individual needs, is key, as is to personalize. And I’m not throwing here words at people. Oh, they’re thinking, ‘Oh, it’s something else, it’s something else, it’s something else’. Can I remind ourselves that differentiation is one of the legislative curriculum principles in the Education Reform Act of 1988. Nobody’s changed that Education Act yet. So we’ve got a solid platform there. Personalization, personalized learning came through in the 2015 Code of Practice on SEND. So that’s a solid building block. And engagement now, and I’m sure, again, we’re going to discuss this in more depth. But as of 2021, engagement is statutory summative assessment for children with special educational needs. So you’ve got three solid building blocks there. No Ofsted inspector can truly challenge you because you’re on solid ground. 

00:17:44.211 – Alis 

I hope you enjoyed that Nip in the Bud nugget. If you want more, why not go back and listen to the whole episode of my guest? If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with others and visit our website for more information, advice, and resources.